Synaesthetic craft

Pickstock still: Plato notes the sensory associations of various arts. Painting renders the visual, music the sound. But language is synaesthetic. A word or combination of words combines the senses, and engenders thought and so, Plato says, gets to the “essence” iof a things that is invisible outside this synaesthetic medium.

Next
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Notes on Anosmia

John Wilson

One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…

Empire of Unreality

Algis Valiunas

Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…

The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist

Peter J. Leithart

It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…